Minimum-wage thought for the day

Last updated on: December 14, 2013 at 11:52 am by Jane the Actuary

Minimum-wage thought for the day 2013-12-14T11:52:00-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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No, I don’t mean a “thought for the day” that’s worth being paid the minimum wage. In fact, this though is probably worth less than the minimum wage as it’s more of a question than a thought.

The supporters of an increase in the minimum wage are always complaining that it’s not possible to support a family on minimum wage — and point to a more idyllic past when it was possible, the proverbial leaving high school and getting a job in the factory the next day.

So my little project is to answer the question of: “did that past really exist?” — or did it exist for more than a brief and historically exceptional period in time?

The Middle Ages: among the peasantry, you couldn’t support a family until you had a farm of your own. Until then, you were a hired hand or stayed on at the family’s plot of land, but you couldn’t marry. A medieval farmer did not marry exceptionally young for this reason — they had to wait until mom & dad died, or “retired” — that is, passed the farm on to the next generation and went to live in the hayloft. And if you were a younger child, then, if you’re lucky, you would marry a girl who stood to inherit, or you’d run off to the city — where you had no greater chance of being able to support a family on the income of an unskilled laborer; the whole concept of apprenticeship – journeyman – master tradesman was invented in the Middle Ages.

Fast forward to the Industrial Revolution. Could a factory worker support his family on his factory wages? Uh, no — ever heard of child labor? And, beyond that, the idea of a 40-hour workweek was unimaginable.

What about the 20th-century United States? — say, the period of the great steel factories and the like, up to the end of the US industrial dominance in the 70s? This is where I’m asking myself: was the “get a well-paying job in the factory” true (and even if so, in the post-war period it was a matter of Europe and Asia in rubble) or just a myth? Were the jobs really of the sort that meant you could support a family with no specialized skills and a 40-hour week, or did many of these jobs have the same build-your-skills expectation, with the only difference that the factory trained you? (Come to think of it: Henry Ford’s assembly line is often characterized as “each person was now responsible for just screwing in a single screw rather than building the whole car” but I wonder how near or far from reality this is, and how skilled the workers had to be.)

Of course, the other difference is that many of these jobs were physically arduous in ways that virtually no jobs are today. Working at McDonald’s requires constant activity, but not the constant heavy lifting and sheer strength of, say, a lumberjack.

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